Post Spectre/Meltdown, Are We More Secure?

It’s human nature in time-critical environments to speculate and execute, remember Radar O’Reilly from M.A.S.H., it’s how we operate at our best. Sometimes you’re wrong and you throw out that work, but the majority of the time you’re right, and the payoff, in the case of an army field hospital could be life-saving. For computer processors, up until recently, that payoff was less critical and the savings could be measured in nanoseconds per successful speculation. Now while nanoseconds on their own don’t sound like much, consider that this savings comes with EVERY successful speculation. Also, it should be noted that there isn’t one block on the processor that is speculating and executing, but rather dozens of them in parallel. Current projections are that patching around the “speculate and execute” set of three flaws could reduce system performance from 5-30%. Friday Apple announced that they’ve patched all their OSes to mitigate just the Meltdown flaw and at worst the performance hit was only 2.5%, they are still working on Spectre. Redhat, which has worked closely with Google’s Project Zero, has not only addressed Meltdown but also Spectre by releasing patches for both sets of flaws.

Many articles and blog posts this week will cover the details of Spectre and Meltdown, and as such, this one won’t. Also, they will devote time on the lengths to which Intel, AMD, ARM, Linux, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, and others will or have gone to plug these holes, this post won’t. The real underlying question is are we more or less safe today as a result of these discoveries?

My view is that this is Shellshock only three years later and in silicon. Let’s flashback to 2014 when Stephane Chazelas discovered a critical security flaw in the Bash Shell after it had been in production for several decades. Within several days five more security flaws were found in the same code. Code that was widely considered stable and trusted. Clearly, it had never been revisited and retested using state-of-the-art hacking techniques. The same was true with speculative execution. It has been a microprocessor design component since the early days of pipelining, possibly as far back as the original IBM ROMP processor of 1981 (precursor to RISC and later the Power Architecture). It appears that chip security experts are now revisiting old trusted silicon techniques with new eyes looking for potential current exploits. This can only be a good thing as it will further secure the computing platforms on which we rely.

In the near term, patching for Spectre and Meltdown will improve security at the expense of performance, but it will only take another chip spin to likely recover that lost ground. At which point we’ll have safer and more trustworthy platforms.

While originally published on January 4th, 2018, this piece has since been updated on January 6, 2018.